SOURCE: H. A. R. Gibb, "Law and Society," in Modern Trends in Islam, The University of Chicago Press, 1947, pp. 85-105.

In the following excerpt, Gibb discusses Islamic law and society as they exist based on the teachings of the Koran, focusing on the inequality of women in Islamic society.

Since social ethics, social institutions, and law are, in principle, functions of the religious system in Islam, all these questions are tied up with religious orthodoxy to a much greater extent than they are in our Western civilization. The newer currents of thought on these subjects consequently flow in two different channels, which can be distinguished, theoretically at least, as the channel of reform and the channel of apologetic. But in practice it is sometimes difficult to say whether what appears to be apologetic is not really a disguised effort toward reform, by the device of defending what the...